And now we are at home again--far from absolutely certain of the name of the winner of the Derby--knowing nothing whatever about any other race of the day--still tenderly affected by the beauty of Clapham--and thoughtful over the ashes of Fortnum and Mason. HARTLEY COLERIDGE. While reading Hartley Coleridge's life, we have been often grieved, but never for a moment have been tempted to anger. There is so much bonhomie, so much unaffected oddity, he is such a queer being, such a _character_, in short, that you laugh more than you cry, and wonder more than you laugh. The judge would be a severe one who could keep his gravity while trying him. One mischief, too, which often attends faulty men of genius is wanting in him. He has not turned his "diseases into commodities"--paraded his vices as if they were virtues, nor sought to circulate their virus. He is, as the old divines were wont to say, a "_sensible_ sinner," and lies so prostrate that none will have the heart to trample on him. His vices, too, were so peculiarly interwoven with his idiosyncrasy, which was to the last degree peculiar, that they can find no imitators. When vice seems ludicrous and contemptible, few follow it; it is only when covered with the gauzy vail of sentimentalism, or when deliberately used as a foil to set off brilliant powers, that it exerts an attraction dangerously compounded of its native charm, and the splendors which shine beside it. Men who are disposed to copy the sins of a gifted, popular, and noble poet like Byron, and who, gazing at his sun-like beams, absorb his spots into their darkened and swimming eyes, can only look with mockery, pity, and avoidance upon the slips of an odd little man, driveling amid the hedgerows and ditches of the lake country, even although his accomplishments were great, his genius undoubted, and his name Coleridge. His nature was, indeed, intensely singular. One might fancy him extracted from his father's side, while he slept, and _dreamed_. He was like an embodied dream of that mighty wizard. He had not the breadth, the length, or the height of S. T. Coleridge's mind, but he had much of his subtlety, his learning, his occasional sweetness, and his tremulous tenderness. He was never, and yet always a child. The precocity he displayed was amazing--and precocious, and nothing more, he continued to the end. His life was a perpetual promise to _be_--a rich unexpanded bud--while his father's was a perpetual promise to _do_--a flower without adequate fruit. It was no wonder that when the father first saw his child his far-stretching eye was clouded with sorrow as he thought, "If I--a whole, such as has seldom been created, have had difficulty in standing alone, how can this be part of myself? If a frail tendency, running across my being, has damaged me, what is to become of one whose name is Frailty?" Some such thought was apparently in his prophetic mind when he wrote the sonnet beginning with